Ozearth Blog

Super woosed-out of our first volunteering, at the Stephanie Alexander Garden in Cygnet. Why? Well, really, it’s because we are still complete townies and are uber cautious about the wet slippery road, with sheer falls on either side! A storm kept us up all night, as did useless panicking about any one of the twelve huge eucalypts surrounding the shed about to topple. So, after freaking out, and the torrential rain all night, the plot was oozing mud, as was Toby’s Hill road. We bottled out, not feeling hearty enough to dig the ute out of foot deep clay. Silly sausages – the ute breezed it down. A tad of mud aqua-planing for parts of a kilometer, but all easy as pie.

Last night I was reading about solar systems and bush property fire-safety, in one of Toby & Mel’s old ‘Soft Technology’ magazines. An article at a time, between frenzied torch-winding. At the moment we are about as fire safe as a stick of dynamite set near an oil-lamp. It has been about 30 or 40 years since a fire burnt out the property, according to who you talk to. During my previous visit, Lindy and I did note many burnt out ancient old trees, with hollow blackened insides and green leafy tops!

Today, we are taking respite in the Internet Center, with Teesy (who is lying in a pool of sunlight, as I write). Nice e-mails and Facebook messages, making us feel connected. Staying with Susan, Michelle & her partner tomorrow night (Dinner! Wine! Bed! Showers! People!).

Some lessons, so far, from the Hill… Tiny wind-up torches – don’t bother! Cuddles fix almost anything. Power-tools are a girl’s best friend. Cake is important. Sherry is equally important. Dog on floor means unwanted dog in bed all night: clumsy paws in groin, or face. A chainsaw is not a luxury item. Kevlar will also be a girl’s best friend. We feel a whole lot less butch than we imagined. Electricity is wonderful. Internet loss is like the loss of an arm; resulting in an alarming shrinking of the brain! Sun makes everything better. The Milky Way is utterly awesome and the silence is amazing. We are building character…!

Tomorrow, Hobart to do the vehicle stuff. Maybe finally catch up with Helen, Andrew, Frances etc in Neika.

Love from three spoiled city sorts!!!

P.S. Tim, we got your lovely Cornish card – thanks!!! It will be pinned to the container wall, with Lindy’s parrots! Bring your winter woolies when you come!

P.P.S Amazing spoiling from Val for our two year wedding anniversary. For lunch, we had a steak pie and Lammington to kick off the spoiling sessions. Thanks Val!!!

Sunday, day three!  This morning was a significant calendar event in Cygnet, the massive Scout garage sale, starting at 10 am.  After meeting more lovely Toby’s Hill neighbours, Paulette (English) and John (American) on the mountainside, we finally got down to the Scout Hall at 10.59, just in time for the 11am start to the National Kitchen Garden tour of Cygnet. Thereby missing  our chance to hoik through the myriad tonnes of random stuff (‘SUS’ to Lindy!) laid out on offer.

As we toured, following Kate (who runs an organic foods outlet ‘The Garden Shed & Pantry’), we met heaps of delightful, like-minded people, mingling amid 63 locals and 3 dogs.  Even traipsing around inelegantly, Teesy is a total marvel, functioning as an irresistible attention-magnet, attracting comments, admiration, pats and the usual jokes about cows and horses. Her size, odd colouring and odd eyes are super conversation starters; after an hour or so, nearly everybody knew her sad-story-now-come-to-good and how well travelled she is. Of course, everybody therefore also knew about us too!  It is obvious Teesy will quickly become a local mascot: she kicked off her charm campaign looking particularly fetching in a new red doggy raincoat coat with a thick fleecy lining, as she staggered about on half cylinders. Poor thing has not yet recovered from a shocking lack of exercise in quarantine, which has made her terribly wobbly in her hind quarters.  All the girls from the Lotus Eaters Café came out to scrump her, offer cuddles and a handful of beautiful cured ham. Yum. The ham was scoffed at shoulder-level, as Teesy had been conked-out on an apple-box picnic table when the girls emerged from the kitchen.

Hoorah for dinner/hanging-out invites! We scored two today – from the super-welcoming Teresa and from Brian & his wife. Brian fell in love with the food-thieving Teese-McSqueeze.  So far, everybody is charming and incredibly generous with advice and contacts. Between conversations, we visited the child-care pre-school, then the public primary, then the Catholic school’s garden projects. After seeing these heartening gardens, we finished at the community garden – dubbed as the ‘only licensed, heritage community tidal garden’ in Australia (the land is on loan from the bottom pub, which is listed and floods up to knee level at neap tides).

To get stuck in and meet people, we have volunteered with Teresa (who runs www.inalife.com.au) at the Catholic school garden project tomorrow morning: this is a Stephanie Alexander kitchen garden and they won 50K of government grant to set it up. The beds are being built as we speak and tomorrow we will be helping the kids fill the raised beds with earth or making a fence. Teesy is also invited! Photos to follow.

For supper, we ate our second evening of stewp, heated-up on the woodstove alone!  Multiple-outputs. By candlelight, we bless Lindy’s name, as we sip on our evening thimble of sherry, which we are ekeing-out with a reverence that borders on religious observance. Last piece of choccy cake each tonight too – these small things take on a massive importance when you are in a holey half-container, wondering what the hell to tackle first…  It is unbelievably quiet up here – the wind, an owl, occasional snuffling outside and the fire crackling are the only things we can hear.

We are praying that none of the newly-dubbed Twelve Apostles (huge, ancient eucalypts) come crashing down on the flimsy container that is now our home: you can see hundreds of tonnes of dead branches up there, like the one that narrowly missed squishing the derelict Toyota truck that Matt has his eye on. Getting these trees felled is a matter of urgency and peace of mind. The wind is wild tonight and I catch myself muttering a thread of constant prayers…

10am start to our volunteering tomorrow! Melbourne is like a dream already, France a mirage and the Netherlands like a separate lifetime ago. We miss everyone madly.

Day 2 – sorting

It was a cold, cold night, and of course the bedding we brought with us wasn’t up to the job – worst of all, the poor dog was absolutely freezing and crept into bed with one or other of us – more or less with our permission – throughout the night. Trouble is, she’s a terrible one for hogging the bedclothes and in my case, stepping on hair!

So today we got a pretty slow, creaky start. the porridge I soaked the previous night was gratifyingly softened, requiring only a five minute heat-through to make it ready for eating. so we munched on porridge, washed ourselves, organised a few small things, and headed into town.

Having made a shopping list (tin foil, doonas, windy-up torches, pegs, jarmy bottoms, coffee, firelighters – yes, we cheat. We’ll stop once we’ve learned how to lay a fire properly. – candles, matches, loopaper) We wended our way through Cygnet, failed to find the scout’s garage sale (largely because it’s happening tomorrow), failed to go to the Cradoc abbatoir (because it only opens twice a week – interestingly, it does open on Sunday, so maybe we’ll make it there tomorrow), failed to find most of what we needed in Huonville – although some provender and some of the other items on the shopping list were duly purchased at Woollies, including, somewhat surprisingly, the desired windy-up torches. The best thing we achieved in Huonville was off-script – we found a really good warm coat for Teesy, with a 40% discount on it (which brought its price down to something we could remotely come at). We also discovered that there are three op-shops in Huonville. The two more promising looking ones were closed at weekends, but it’s still nice to know they’re there for future reference.

Not having managed to find the critical thing on the list (DOONAS and PJ BOTTOMS) we cracked on to Kingston, and hit the jackpot in the op-shops there – a pair of trackydacks and two awful but hopefully warm comforters were duly purchased.

Then the drive home, and my first experience of navigating Toby’s Hill Road. Slightly hair-raising in a few somewhat boggy spots, but largely surprisingly okay. What an excellent thing a 4wd is.

There is much to look forward to tomorrow – the Scout sale (maybe some plants and / or cuttings and / or seeds!), Cradoc Hill being open, and International Kitchen Garden day, incorporating a walk through four Cygnetsiders’ kitchen gardens, followed by a barbecue. Reckon it’ll be a fab day!

We arrived home shortly before dusk, and set about the evening’s tasks – getting the fire on, preparing dinner, etc. All went swimmingly until about an hour after dinner, when the shelf containing all our food and quite a lot of other important stuff collapsed somewhat dramatically off the wall.

Near-miraculously, the only breakages were one plate, one burst spice packet, and (sadly) two freecycled Vacola jars carefully procured for us by Aunt L. The sherry and all the eggs survived, and I’m glad to say that the heirloom glasses and decanter were being kept elsewhere. It’s amazing that it wasn’t much worse; we cleaned up, rearranged some things so that the small hoppity animals wouldn’t get them, and all was well.

When I went out for the last time tonight, the astonishing spectacle of the Milky way was being accompanied by the hooting of an owl.

So, there was a flurry of entries about how screwed up the world was, and what we’d decided to do in order to help remedy that. And then there were a couple of updates, and a couple of fairly random things…

And then all was silence. So, what happened to OzEarth?

Well, Chloe went to California and apprenticed with CalEarth, and to England to learn about lime (plastering, rendering and washing, which entails also learning about cob, etc etc), and worked at the botanical garden at intervals in between. Helen stayed in the Netherlands and did various things, trying to steer the ship towards leaving the Netherlands and going to the Hill.

The visa for Chloe came through, after much faff, early this year. The renovation of the Hilversum house finally dragged to more or less a satisfactory close at around the same time, and in March the house went on the market.

In early May, we got an opening offer on the house, and by mid-May we had a deal. It took quite a lot longer for the deal to close in a definitive way, but by the first week of July we were locked and loaded.

There followed a frenzy of paperwork (the dog’s papers in particular were quite the feat of organisation) and packing, and finally, on July 25, we were ready to go.

It’s been a somewhat circuitous journey. I had one last gig in the Perigord region of France (nice work if you can get it) and then we spent three lovely weeks in Melbourne (and in my case also in Canberra), visiting my mum and my aunt Lindy while we waited for Teesy’s release from Quarantine and attempted, as best we could, to get our act sorted for the next step.

We acquired a vehicle, did frantic research, and participated (me as student, C as co-teacher) in an earthbag build held by Permastructures in West Heidelberg. All went swimmingly and somehow both very slowly (particularly, I imagine, for the poor dog) and very fast.

And suddenly, Teesy’s release date was upon us, and we were picking her up and jumping on a ferry to Tasmania, vehicle, baggage, Teesy and all.

We came into Devonport at 6 o-clock this morning, and spent a leisurely day today wending our way down Highway 1 and the A86, visiting Oatlands where there’s a restored wind-powered flourmill, picking up veggies and sausages for dinner, eating, wandering, driving, marvelling at the perfect day Tassie had turned on for our homecoming.

We hit Cygnet at about 3pm. Having had a quick coffee and a very warm welcome with Susan, the proprietor of the Cobweb Galleries, I emptied the PO Box (VERY full, and Mum will be pleased to hear, not at floor level ), enquired about membership at the internet centre (I’m an addict. There. I said it), and hooned off to get up to the land while we still had some daylight left.

This was the point at which things went somewhat awry. The road we were driving along, which goes up to the land… had a tree across it. A LARGE tree. This does happen from time to time, but we hadn’t really planned for it; as such, we hadn’t actually worked out how to get up to the land using the other road (happily for us there’s more than one option!)

With a somewhat alarming, very cautiously executed nineteen-point turn opposite a rather steep drop, some Zen navigation and a fair bit of help from our neighbours, we actually did manage to make it up to the land, just as dusk was falling.

A bit of extremely hurried organisation, a barbecued meal, a fire, a kettle for hot water bottles, some pretty basic toilet facilities… but here we are. Welcome home, H & C.

First impressions: it’s BEAUTIFUL here. It’s very, very hilly, which automatically makes things pretty if you ask me. The plant life is gorgeous. At one point, the pink fluffy clouds, amethyst sky and silhouetted trees actually brought tears to my eyes. The clearing is dismayingly full of crap, but C and Lindy already made a fairly thorough survey of what might be useful last time. The rest, it’s just a matter of getting back down the mountainside :-/.

It’s certainly basic, but it’ll do, and everything from hereon out is a process of continuous improvement.

And the night sky is absolutely breathtaking.